A friend asked recently: “What advice would you give to a new student?” His daughter is preparing to start a course at the University of Sheffield. My first thought was to admit that perhaps I am actually not the best person. The student experience today is fundamentally different from what it was 30 years ago.

One of the dangers of being a university teacher is of losing touch with the memory of what it meant to be a student. Chatting to a current third-year student while she served me in the college bookshop, I asked her if she thought about further study after her degree. “I’d like to do an MA … but I’d have to save up first.” It really shocked me. Of course, that’s how students have to think. There is something deeply humbling in the thirst that young people have for learning regardless of its cost. Anyway, this advice is for new students anywhere who are thinking nervously about the prospects of university life.

Listen but don’t be silent

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once gave a series of lectures on the future of educational institutions. In his fifth lecture Nietzsche imagines a foreign visitor trying to make sense of academic study. The visitor asks what is the students’ point of connection to thinking and knowledge. The narrator in Nietzsche’s parable responds: “By the ear, as a hearer.” The lecture continues but the visitor is astonished and asks again: surely listening isn’t the only way that a student is connected to learning. Nietzsche’s professor reiterates that undergraduates are connected to the university “only by the ear … The student hears”.

The commercialisation of higher education cheapens us all. Photograph: Alamy

Much of the architecture of higher learning is dedicated to reinforcing the image of Nietzsche’s obediently silent student. Students sit in row after row of seats all directed toward the stage and the lectern. It is impossible to have a proper group discussion in a lecture theatre – they are designed for monologues, not dialogues. Nikolas Rose [former head of sociology at Goldsmiths] once told me of a session he would hold at the beginning of the academic year that tried to make this authority structure explicit. He would turn up to a large first-year lecture in sociology, take to the stage, open his file of notes and place them on the lectern. He would look down at his notes, but say absolutely nothing! Often latecomers would arrive apologetically with umbrellas after being soaked by an autumn shower. Someone near the front would say: “It’s alright – he hasn’t started yet.” They found their seats. The expectant students waited silently, pens poised, for Rose to say something. He said nothing. One year he managed to say nothing for 40 minutes.

When the excruciating silence was eventually broken, he would use it to explore how it could be understood sociologically. The ordering of speaking and listening is part of the social furniture of the lecture hall and Rose would invite students to think about the way power, authority and knowledge were implicated in what had unfolded that morning. I doubt it was a lecture any of his students ever forgot.

Nietzsche captures something important. Higher learning means that students have to train their ears. It is increasingly hard in our world of distractions to listen with undivided attention for a whole hour. Via mobile phones we hold the world in the palm of our hand, and the temptation to text and email under the table is particularly strong. Many educators believe that the kind of obedient listening that takes place in a lecture is actually not a very good way to learn at all. I am sure this is right. However, a lecture is a listening workout. It forces students to face the difficulties of training a deep attentiveness.

Reading is the most important thing that any student does. Photograph: Sam Edwards/Getty Images/OJO Images RF

It is unsurprising then that students find it hard to speak out, ask questions or for points of clarification when they don’t understand. They don’t want to appear foolish or incapable. So, listen attentively but don’t be silenced by the authority structure of the lecture hall. There is no such thing as a foolish question. It is the teacher’s job to help you understand. This also goes for seminars and workshops. Regardless of the heavy historical weight of academic authority, every lecturer’s worst nightmare is a group of students who will not speak. So train your ear, listen carefully, but don’t be silent.

Read and buy books

Reading is the most important thing that any student does. There are so many online sources today that are useful to students, but the habit of reading books – whole books – is something that is being lost. Students often come into my study and say: “God, you’ve got lots of books, have you read them all?”

“Yes, most of them,” I reply. “They are the fundamental tools of the trade and they are the tools of your trade, too.”

Buy your own books. There are many bargains to be found on used-book websites or through the dubious magic of Amazon. Buy books.

When I was a student, I found an early 20th-century dictionary in a local used bookshop. It has a wonderful glossary of Latin phrases, proverbs, maxims and mottoes. I still use it. Every time I need to look up a word for its precise meaning, I mark it with a pencil. After 30 years, the dictionary is like a record of my education. This is partly why having books is so important because we leave an imprint of ourselves and our reading eye in them through our scribbles and the passages that we highlight or underline.

Being a book lover and buyer will help any student get the most out of their education.

Don’t try to do it all the night before

As a student, you don’t just have to learn to listen and become a critical reader: you also have to become an academic writer. I often say to students that the story of a degree begins with learning how to consume and read critically the books in the field of study, but ends with them becoming producers and writers of sociology. The short version of what I want to say is that this cannot be done in a rush the night before. Resist the temptation to cut and paste passages from the internet or to copy sections from books. You’ll hear a lot about plagiarism in the course of your degree. Universities are unforgiving and have almost criminalised copying. In most cases, students who plagiarise do it out of desperation or because it is a shortcut when they are running out of time.

Last year a student came to see me to talk about a paper she’d written for my course. She had received a very low mark, barely passed. The grade at this point was provisional because the papers were due to be sent to the external examiner to be evaluated. She avoided eye contact. “What happened?” I asked. “I am so ashamed and disappointed in myself and I am sorry,” she said. “I did it the night before – just to get something in.” I told her that all that was left was to try to learn from the experience.

Learning to think critically cannot be done in a rush the night before. Photograph: Peopleimages/Getty Images

The external examiner looked at the paper and insisted – rightly – that it had been marked too leniently and failed it. I am always reluctant to fail students. As our department administrator said: “Les, you are not doing them any favours by letting it pass when it shouldn’t.” Former warden Richard Hoggart reflected in his memoir: “Goldsmiths’ weakness grew directly out of its good will. It hated to close its doors to anyone; it agonised even more than is usual about possible examination failures; it rallied to any member in difficulties; it often made judgments more with the heart than the head.” I realised that I’d fallen foul of this well-intentioned vice.

Before long the summer resits came around. A package of papers arrived to be marked including the re-sit from the student mentioned. The paper was unrecognisable – thoughtful, informed, well written – I graded it as a high 2.1 before realising who had written it. When the results were announced, a very different student came to see me. Her face bright and animated, she said: “I worked really hard on it and in the end I was really proud of what I did. Showed myself that I can really do this.” Her mark was capped at 50 because of the initial failure, but the essay was considerably better than the bare pass. I had learned something, too. I had been wrong to pass it and if the external examiner hadn’t insisted on dropping the grade, the student would have been denied the opportunity to try again. In many respects, re-writing the assessment has proved to be the turning point in her degree and her whole university education. She’s no longer a failing student.

Written work at this level cannot be done at the last minute or in a rush. It takes time. Use your teachers: if they will read draft essays then make sure you can get feedback ahead of the final submission. If they won’t read drafts, then see them to run through your ideas. Students who get feedback on their work always do better than those who do not. It is one of the few educational laws that holds true in all cases.

Don’t be just a consumer

“I need to get the most out of this because I am paying for it,” I overheard a first-year say to her friend as she dashed to an induction meeting. The marketisation of the university has turned campuses into places of commerce. It corrodes the value of thinking and learning. Money can’t buy a thought, or a connection between ideas or things, or a link between a private trouble and a public issue. The idea that education promises a straightforward return on a financial outlay reduces thought to a commodity. The commercialisation of higher education cheapens us all. It is entirely logical that students should start to see themselves as paying customers. I think it is incumbent on staff to make their teaching worth the price it has cost.

Students need to be offered an environment for learning, and if that’s not forthcoming they should demand it to be so. “The more it costs, the less it’s worth,” students shouted in protest to the introduction of fees and indebtedness. Nevertheless, thinking and intellectual growth cannot be purchased “off the peg”. It makes universities into places of skills transmission, or a kind of financial transaction. The university can foster a place where we can “think together” about difficult problems and practise what Fichte called the “exercise of critical judgment”. This means not being just a consumer, and thinking for yourself with others.

Back in professor of sociology at Goldsmiths College, London. Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters (Goldsmiths Press) is out 29 April.